I installed the Resources folder for V Collection 9 to an external 1TB SSD following all instructions on Arturia website onto a MacBook Air running Monterey. Install was successful and instruments appear to work, but what should have been a 30GB file grew to 650GB before the download was complete.
This was after I tried moving the Resource folder (again following the Arturia instructions) when it had already been installed on my laptop. The result that time was an 800GB folder that locked up V Collection and MainStage until I removed all MainStage concerts with V Collection plugins.
Arturia support initially suggested I do an uninstall/clean install after the first attempt (which worked, except the folder is eating up most of the SSD). But they seemed surprised to hear of this problem, though I’ve seen it referenced elsewhere.
There has to be a stray or corrupt file somewhere or some errant setting causing this. Any ideas?
Hi @Matt62704 and welcome to The Sound Explorers Forum!
Sorry to hear this is happening to you, i did follow your link to Reddit, interesting read, it appears it’s highly likely there’s an OS specific bug in the process of using The ARC to move your resources folder to an external drive.
I don’t have an external drive, nor am i on a Mac, but i have moved my resources folder to a separate, internal SSD and it does indeed work as expected.
I’ll list this as a bug for you so our team are aware of it and any other users that might be experiencing the same can add their voices too.
Just got a reply from Arturia support and it turns out the giant folder size is normal for drives formatted in exFAT or Fat32. I was glad to hear it’s not a problem in my system. I could reformat the drive in NTFS or some other format to save space, but they said that could result in slower drive speed.
I suggested they put something in the FAQ instructions alerting Mac users that they’ll need a lot of space on the new location if it’s using the typical Mac formats.
Here is the full explanation from Arturia support for the record:
Hi Matt,
So, in fact the observed behavior is pretty normal and related to the Filesystem used on your secondary volume or external drive where you moved the resources files.
As an information, “ExFat” and “Fat32” filesystems are usually defining by default when formatted the allocation unit size to a higher size than most of the recent filesystems leading all the very small files to use more space on drive than expected as explained in the articles below (hence why you can see a huge difference between the file sizes themselves and the space really used on the drive):
Workaround are the following:
Reformat the drive to another more recent Filesystems (NTFS / HFS / HFS+ / APFS) which are using a lower size for the allocation units (but may prevent the drive to be accessible both on Mac OS and Windows at the same time (may work with specific third party utilities/ paying software).
Reformat the drive to either ExFat or Fat32 with a lower unit allocation size:
By default Fat32 drives with a capacity between 32 GB and 2 TB should be defined to 32 KB:
32 GB—2 TB: 32 KB
This means that a file less than 32 KB (such as 2 KB for exemple) will always use at least 32KB of space on the drive.
exFAT drives are using by default: 32GB – 256TB:128KB
This means that a file less than 128 KB (such as 2 KB for exemple) will always use at least 128KB of space on the drive.
So, the more small files you write (and we have many), the more space it will use on drive compared to a filesystem with a lower allocation unit size.
=> NTFS filesystem is usually defining the unit allocation size to 8 KB by default, so reformatting with a similar allocation unit size should help.
Of course, both will require to first backup datas before proceeding as this will ERASE everything.
As a side note:
Using a really small allocation unit size allows to reduce the space used on drive when copying multiple very small files but may slow down the access time and the write and read speeds.
Using a bigger allocation unit size will lead to more space used on drive when copying multiple small files but will speed up the access time and the write and read speeds (mostly recommended when storing big files on drive such as pictures/videos etc…)
